The SEOTuners Blog

Monthly Archives: April 2017

Building your online presence is significant for your business. Yet, you don’t have to spend lavishly on SEO. Here are several steps that you can take to achieve the same goal at a fraction of the price many others pay for comparable results.

Avoid Keyword Stuffing

If you know anything about the integrated Google algorithm, you know that its biggest pet peeve is keyword stuffing. If you have researched the primary keywords that your consumers search for, then you’re done with basic research.

However, it does not mean you should overload every single webpage, blog post and image description with that keyword. Any professional white hat SEO services expert would tell you that keyword stuffing will get you booted off Google search result pages sooner than you will reach the first page. Maintain a realistic keyword density and only publish high-quality content.

Regular Posts Brings Regular Traffic

Online presence is not something that you can update sporadically, and expect premium results from your efforts. You need to update it on a regular basis – sharing fresh content to appeal to your growing audience week after week.

This ongoing engagement will boost your organic reach, showing Google that people are actively using and viewing your page. This type of activity goes over well within the standard search engine algorithm and will gradually boost your presence in the search results pages because of it.

It’s Not All about the Words

Working very hard to craft the perfectly spelled, well-written article or blog is a great idea. However, like icing on a delicious cake, you need to enhance the quality of your content by adding images and engaging videos as the “icing.”

A study shows that 85 percent of consumers are more likely to buy a specific product after they have watched a product video, per Inc magazine. The same report claims that 84 percent of communications will be visual before 2018. Spread high-quality images that connect to your content through each page and article, adding a little “flavor” to your website that will keep your audience interested and engaged for lasting SEO results.

Speed is the reason why people take Interstates over back-roads, shop at convenience stores instead of supermarkets and skip commercials with a DVR remote instead of watching them in real-time. Most consumers want to get from Point A to Point B as quickly as they can, which is exactly why your website’s page loading speed is critical. A web development services agency in Los Angeles and Venturawould tell you that “less is more” – especially if it allows you to quickly convert your short-term guests into long-term customers.

Delayed Page, Lost Customers

It has been proven by numerous studies that delays in page loading times lead to abandoned online shopping carts and dissatisfied customers. One study shows that 47 percent of consumers expect websites to load within a maximum of 2 seconds, per Business 2 Community.

The same report claims that 40 percent of consumers will leave a webpage if they must wait longer than 3 seconds for it to load completely. The “it’s worth the wait” concept clearly does not apply in this scenario, especially if they are able to leave your website and get what they want from your competitors’ site instead in a fraction of the time.

Raising Your Awareness of Loaded Content

Another key reason why you should pay close attention to your page speed is it will help you monitor your loaded content effectively. Most delays, freezes and website crashes are caused by an excessive amount of data trying to load at the same time. If your pages have a lot of integrated media, embedded images and videos and social media links, all these content items can quickly clash against each other – fighting over the same bandwidth to an extent where nothing gets done. While designing the site, you may think that all this loaded content is a perk. However, you will soon discover that it is not as advantageous as you think when you realize that not many people are sticking around long enough to access it.

Conclusion

It is true that you should want to present quality content on your company’s website. However, you also need to find a balance between quality content and expeditious loading times. In order to engage your target audience, it is very necessary to make it narrative over descriptive.

In modern SEO strategies merely posting content isn’t enough, it’s necessary to engage the audience. Engagement acts as the base in driving more traffic and increases the potential for conversions. Here are several modern ways to increase the content engagement in your blog:

Add Images Throughout the Blog

Think about your childhood storybooks from when you first learned to read. The authors and publishers knew that you needed visual content to stay engaged with their products – pictures, pop-up images, fuzzy objects, scratch and sniff pages and so much more. How many images do you embed within your average blog post?

Most people seem to focus on the featured image – making sure that the headlining image is solid. However, that image does little good if it is followed by 800-1,000+ words of typed content without an image in sight. Use a solid featured image, but also complement the article with embedded images throughout the content as well.

Add Engaging Videos to Your Content

Words on a page are effective, especially when they are beautifully selected and strategically structured into well-written sentences. However, this type of content can only go but so far when it comes to keeping your audience engaged.

Thanks to social media, you can keep your audience engaged with live footage and well-edited recordings embedded within your blog. One study shows that people spent triple the amount of time watching live videos on Facebook than pre-recorded footage, per Social Media Today. Perhaps you can find a way to integrate live videos within your blog content. You can also enhance these benefits further by investing in an organic SEO company that can show you how to boost exposure and appeal to your audience even more.

Do Not Be Too Wordy

As mentioned above, a well-written blog post can captivate the attention of your audience and is a great read. However, if you want to retain their engagement, you should remember the old saying that “less is more.” While it is very easy to write thousands of words within an emotionally-stirring blog post (especially if you are passionate about the topic being addressed) it is not recommended.

If you want to engage your audience with your content, then you need to tailor your blogs to meet their needs – a quick read with engaging content that they will want to share with others.

There are always times – dire times, but these exist for everyone - when a website needs to take a few hours or days of me-time. That’s not so much personal time, as it is maintenance time – time for you or your webmaster to make important changes, fix graphical errors and grammatical mistakes, use a Penguin recovery service from SeoTuners, update outdated information and generally polish the website up to be a bit better than it was yesterday.

One way or another, simply disappearing off the face of the Earth or cutting off all information on your site is a bad idea for two simple reasons: 1.) you’ll alienate visitors by presenting them with absolutely nothing when you’ve promised them content, and 2.) Google will still crawl your page if you’re not careful, and rank you according to your nonexistent, downed page.

To avoid that and make sure you get a clean, temporary break without majorly affecting your overall traffic numbers or your ranking online, take the following steps:

Get Your 503 Right

The HTML 503 error is a rather common one you may have encountered several times throughout your surfing life, and it specifically refers to an “Unavailable Service” as per Lifewire. Be sure to offer both some type of interstitial or temporary maintenance site (and perhaps a pop-up) and a 503 error.

End Crawling

In your site’s robots.txt file or through a robots meta tag, you should be able to add a quick clause that tells Google there’s nothing worth crawling here at the moment as per Google. This is down through a “disallow” directive in the document itself.

Announce the Maintenance

For regular users of your service, there’s nothing quite like unannounced maintenance. Most people can live with being slapped with a 503 on a nonessential service as long as they get a succinct and rational explanation through Facebook or your mailing list.

No matter how you choose to announce the maintenance, it’s important to do so at least about a business week in advance and with the right explanation – regular maintenance, site update, etc. As long as you keep your customers in the loop and Google happy, taking your site off for a day shouldn’t hurt you at all.